The Pandemic Isn't Over

560,000 are now dead—and more than 50 people are still dying every hour.

If there’s one thing that The Former Guy taught us about pandemics it’s that you can’t just wish them away.

With America’s “Coronaversary” now behind us, everybody is ready for this all to be over and hoping for things to get back to normal ASAP. Grandparents want to hug their grandkids. Theater actors want to perform on real stages. Apparently, some office workers are even craving actual in-person meetings again.

Biden’s new goal of 200 million vaccinations in his first 100 days is impressive. It’s great to have government functioning properly again. But the current 7-day average of new cases is rising again—up from 55,178 on March 15 to 58,579 on March 25. That’s close to the July peak and higher than the level in mid-October. The death toll, according to Worldometers, in now at 560,000. On Wednesday and Thursday this week, more than 2,500 Americans died. That’s more than 50 people every hour.

Biden’s success at ramping up vaccinations means we now have a real chance to end the pandemic. But that doesn’t mean we couldn’t still blow it. States are rushing to reopen even as experts warn about variant surges and mutations that may be vaccine resistant. Texas, for example, is 100% open for business despite being still only 11% vaccinated (ranking 48th among states in vaccinations per capita).

The daily onslaught of Covid-19 statistics has—day by day, week by week, month by month—made us numb to the devastating consequences of Trump’s recklessness and incompetence in handling the pandemic. The media has failed, too. They have failed to explain to Americans how bad it is here—even as other countries have trusted science and used basic, low-cost measures to keep cases and deaths down.

Remembering Those We’ve Lost

Since the early days of the pandemic, many people and news organizations have continued to remind us that there is a story behind every Covid death.

The New York Times launched its “Those We’ve Lost” feature almost one year ago, on March 27, 2020.

Alex Goldstein, who I interviewed in December, launched his Twitter project @FacesOfCOVID that same month.

By August 2020, when the death toll was equivalent of a new 9/11 every three days, Kristin Urquiza was speaking at the Democrat’s virtual convention. Urquiza had formed the group Marked by Covid after going viral in July for an obituary blaming Trump and Arizona’s Republican Governor Doug Ducey for her father Mark Anthony Urquiza’s death

Since May of last year, I’ve been adding to a Twitter thread highlighting some of those who have been lost to Covid. And last night I added another name to the list: Gail Slatter’s is the latest obituary The New York Times has added to “Those We’ve Lost.” Hers was a death that struck a chord at the Times. She had worked there for 40 years before retiring in 2014. Because she was so fondly remembered at the paper, many of her colleagues posted personal memories of her.

Here are a few of those tweets:

The pandemic isn’t over.